Shirty
Tuesday 24 April 2007
Now the hell that is the weekend is over, we're back to the sheer tedium of 'the rest of the week'.
Quiet tonight; we actually closed just after midnight. Nothing really to report except one minor incident involving a member of the bar team. He came over to me and said, "Three guys over there are threatening me." Now, there's two things you should know about this chap. One, he's a Geordie. And two, like all Geordies, and most Northerners, it doesn't take a lot for him to beam into 'wahey!' mode. In fact, not very much at all.
So I go over to the three blokes and ask them to come outside for a chat. The bartender follows us outside as he wants to give his take on what happened. Edmonson joins us. Immediately the threesome start talking at me a mile a minute and it's fairly obviously they're coked up to the eyeballs. I ask what happened.
"Right, we were in there... this is our first night, right... we didn't know you couldn't smoke inside..."
"Yes you did," says the bartender, "I fucking told you!"
"Yeah, he told us," one of them replies, "But we didn't know... it's our first night... and then he starts talking all this shit..."
"No I fucking didn't!"
"Yes he did... he says if he wasn't wearing this shirt..."
(meaning his uniform)
"... he'd 'fucking batter us right now...'"
"No I fucking didn't!"
"Yes you fucking did, you liar!"
And on and on. The thing is, by this time, both Edmonson and myself quickly realised that the lads side of the story seemed the most likely. Yes, they had been caught smoking in a non-smoking area, possibly more than once, but that's a mistake loads of pissheads make. What clearly hadn't helped - in fact, what had made things a lot worse - was the bartender's attitude. As said, he'd immediately, or very quickly, gone into that 'I'm hard, me' mode and made things ten times worse. Moreover, he'd repeated this behaviour outside the bar, and the first rule of customer service is you don't use the word 'fuck' when speaking to a customer. You just don't. Believe me, it never helps.
So, Edmonson tells him to piss off. He leaves. The blokes calm down and while they're wasted, they seem to be on the level. We let them back inside, and I go around the back of the bar to speak to Shirty. He's all puffed up like he means business. I'm like, you can't speak to people like that because it just acts as a trigger.
"I'll fucking batter them!" he says.
No you won't, I reply. You need to calm down. I tell him that I'm on his side (tip: even though you really remain impartial, tell everybody you're on their side. It diffuses 99.99 per cent of all tension) but that by acting that way he's set them off. He's good, they're very bad, but by acting in that way he made my job harder. He seemed to get it, but by then his cheeks were so inflated and his face so red it was hard to tell. The thing is, this isn't the first time this has happened (although it was the most severe), and I had to report it. I made a point of telling the big cheese that I didn't have any interest in ragging on the guy or getting him into trouble, but anytime anybody makes our job tougher then something has to be said. Shirty's actually an alright bloke most of the time but, as said, when his ego is challenged, he goes from 0-60 a little too quickly.
Otherwise, that's about it. So I'll leave you with this. In a couple of months of working here I've learned one very important thing - there's one song that gets more couples and absolutely more women on the dance floor than any other. And it's miles ahead of anything else. Believe me, this packs the dancefloor each and every night it's played.
You're not going to like it. But it's a cold, hard fact.
Enjoy.
posted by Sheamus @ 1:50 am
